Media Copyright Infringement Debate - Con (Golden Ram I)

These days, obtaining digital media for just a fraction of the retail cost or even free is as easy as borrowing a friend’s CD and putting it into your burner, or downloading a file-sharing program like Kazaa. There are numerous arguments on the morality and legality of it all, which I’ll be addressing in this piece, but I’d like to pose one question out there first. It should occur, at some point or another, to everyone who does obtain free, illegitimate copies of media, that something isn’t right. Restaurants don’t hand out free food, car dealers don’t let people test drive cars and keep them, so why would people think that the media industry is willingly handing out their products for free? Even if you do argue that it’s legal, (which it is not) at the very least it’s flirting with the line. So what’s separating these hundreds of millions of people from crossing the line and committing absolute crimes, like petty theft, or, when most of us teens become older, fraud? They’re all stealing from somebody; whether it’s a person, some faceless corporation, or Big Brother himself. The only difference I can see in the reasoning of those who commit these crimes is convenience. It’s easy to go online or plop a CD into a drive, and the risk from the comfort of your own home is virtually zilch. You have to put in an effort, dedicate some time, and run a much larger risk in order to commit petty theft or a fraud scandal. So is that what the youth of America has become? A bunch of criminal minds who would be wreaking havoc except for the fact that they’re too lazy to do so?

A lot of people, and I’m absolutely sure that more than half of this school, engages in some sort of media piracy. They justify and rationalize it by saying that a few songs or games doesn’t really hurt the industry; those artists are making enough money anyway; it’s legal as long as I’m not selling it to others; I’m just demoing the media to decide if I want to actually buy it; it’s all just potential money anyway, so the industry isn’t really losing anything; the media industry is actually robbing me of my money when they’re charging high prices for a crappy product.

Well, first off, pirating does cost the industry a lot. Case in point: Looking Glass Studios, which went out of business though it created quality games that should have been extremely profitable. Last year, the entertainment software industry (which includes PC, console, and handheld games) lost an estimated $3 billion dollars. But why should you care? The industry pulled in more than twice that figure in profits, and wasn’t that just money that big-shot developers would be using on a second Ferrari anyway? Those guys would gladly accept a 1/3 cut in salary, right? Or, better yet, 1/3 of the industry would be laid off to save you $50 on a single game. The media industry is not a bunch of faceless corporations—it’s an industry of working-class people, just like your parents or the staff at Westmoor. How would your life be changed if your household income were cut by a third? The majority of the industry is interns, janitors, mailroom grunts, factory workers overseas; people who wouldn’t be able to live without that 1/3 salary. When you burn a game or download a song, you’re literally stealing the bread out of their mouths.

As for potential money, I can guarantee you that if these convenient methods of copying media didn’t exist, the vast majority of people would be buying all of that media legally. And as for “the artists make most of their money on concerts anyway,” this is simply not true. Musicians are not tour-machines; they are not constantly performing throughout the year. When they do, typical revenue is about 10,000 people * $100 * 20 shows = $20 million. After you factor out the costs of renting the theater, the cost for stage materials, paying the salaries of security guards, secondary performers, stage engineers, clean-up crews, sound technicians, and all of the other people involved in producing a concert, the actual profit is not even close to producing a multi-platinum CD at pennies a copy. And other industries, such as entertainment software, don’t have other avenues of income outside of the sale of their product—names like Carmack, Romero, and Meier just don’t have the type of mainstream impact as Britney, Blink, or Beyonce.

And here’s something that you might not know, or might have fooled yourself into thinking conversely; downloading and sharing media is illegal. Whether you’re making money or not. Just because it doesn’t cost them anything physically (i.e., you’re “just stealing a copy, and not actually anything tangible”), it doesn’t mean that you’re not hurting them. And just because it might be easy to do, or because the industry hasn’t pursued it as hard as it should thus far, doesn’t make it any better. Does it matter in trial of a burglar, whether the door was locked or unlocked, or whether the owner left wads of cash in plain sight on the windowsill? In any case, downloading music or copying games is illegal—it’s the law, and you can’t argue around that. Feel free to write your local congressman to change legislature, but until that happens, infringing on media copyrights will never be right in a legal sense.

Then there are those who claim to be “trying out” the media to decide if they want to buy it or not. That’s simply a lie; how many of you who used that excuse have kept the media that you burned or downloaded? And if you really wanted to “try it out,” there are things called the radio, or game demos, or borrowing a friend’s music CD, or the song previews that are on just about every major online site that sells music. All of these are free, and most importantly, officially sanctioned and endorsed by the companies that produced the product. And if a song isn’t released on the radio, or a developer doesn’t release a demo, then it’s just simply a decision made by the company, and you don’t have a say in it. You can bash the company, flame their bad business practice, swear to never buy a product again, but whatever you do, don’t make the mistake that you are entitled to a demo. It’s the property of the companies that produced it, and they can do whatever they choose with it.

And then there’s the most ignorant excuse that I’ve ever heard, that people are should be able to obtain free media, because the product is bad and overpriced. Do you get free hamburgers at McDonald’s just because the food is bad and overpriced? There are hundreds of bad and overpriced products out there, and people don’t steal them. They respond by not buying them. Believing that you’re entitled to things for which you put no effort in to reward the labor of the producer completely undermines our nation’s economic system. And in the end, media is bad and overpriced directly because of piracy.

Consumers who work so hard to obtain a product for free just end up shooting themselves in the foot, as well as every other person who enjoys music and games. As stated before, things that you created are your property, and you can do whatever you choose with them, and can charge whatever price you want for them. And if you overcharge or your product is bad, then the consumer simply won’t buy it. That’s why the superior, cheaper product is supposed to prevail, and why the bad products fade out and die. But if the good product is being stolen, and in the end makes just as much money as the bad product, what’s the incentive of making a good product? If you shelled out twice as much for a product, and in the end it performed just as well as all the cheap-o imitations out there, then why the heck would you want to invest more in a product that doesn’t provide any additional gains? And that’s how the whole business, including you, the consumer, is being hurt by this. Piracy and its costs discourages producers. Why waste time recording three more tracks on a CD if it’s all just going to be downloaded anyway? Sure, the developers really wanted to make 25 levels instead of 13, and wanted to implement all those extra features (like a multiplayer mode?!?), but they had to account for losing 1/3 of their profits due to piracy, and in the end those missing resources prevented them from making the game that you really wanted.

So next time you load up your Kazaa or CloneCD to copy a song or game, think twice about the consequences that your actions will have on the artists, on the producers, on the working-class people, on the future of the industry, and the quality and price of the media that you will be buying in the future. And who knows... It may be your door that the RIAA is knocking down tomorrow.